Just a few photos of my niece and her 6th birthday, she received a baking set and had to try it out:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

My brother has been trying out his new smoker. He and my sister-in-law made dinner for my parents and my niece made the dessert. This was from my SIL’s facebook post Sunday:

Well we had the parents over for supper. Smoked Cornish game hens mashed potatoes and they brought over baked broccoli and cheese and D. made individual chocolate cakes covered with cherry pie filling and powdered sugar

I liked the deep fried broccoli we had the other day so much I did a repeat on it. Pretty simple recipe: Blanch the florets for a minute and cool them quickly in an ice bath, mix 1/2 cup self rising flour with 1/2 cup of milk in a bowl, then add seasonings of choice to another cup of self rising flour in another bowl. Dip in the batter, then dredge the battered florets through the seasoned flour and drop them into 375 degree oil until they brown nicely.

I ran across this recipe for a dipping sauce and decided to give it a whirl. Pretty tasty!

Yum. What do you mean I have to take a bunch of pictures before I can even try it?

Finally got the cream cheese in between two snow storms. It’s sunny now, I expect by noon the snow to be completely gone and I’ll be cycling by late afternoon. So I took the morning to make this pie.

A week or so ago, a neighbor brought over a slice of store-bought pumpkin cream pie, wanting to know if I had a recipe. It was very good, creamy as opposed to custard style. I preferred that, because one of the things I’m only so-so on is the texture of standard pumpkin pie. This addressed that, while keeping all the flavor.

The slice was heavily spiced and I like that, too. So when I went searching for recipes, none of them had enough spice, so I knew I was going to have to take some risks with the spices. I tasted in between and continued to add until I felt like I had a good ratio. I got a good idea from several recipes what would make it creamy and then I just went and played.

The first thing, the crust. I didn’t want a traditional pastry crust because I think those get mushy when you do a custard type pie. I thought I’d do a graham cracker crust until I saw someone use a ginger snap crust in a recipe and thought that would be a great, so that’s the crust I included with this. You can use any type you like and if you want graham cracker, just substitute the same amount of graham cracker crumbs for ginger snap crumbs.

Then I saw a recipe for brown sugar whipped cream and knew that would be perfect for this pie. So when I put it all together, this is what I came up with:

Pumpkin Cream Pie

Crust:

2 cups ginger snap crumbs

1/2 cup melted butter (more as needed, mine could have used a couple more tablespoons)

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

Mix together in a 9-inch pie pan and press around the bottom and sides. Bake at 400 degrees for 5 minutes. Cool while making pie filling.

Filling:

4 oz cream cheese, room temperature

15 oz pumpkin puree

1/3 cup whipping cream

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 to 1 tsp salt (test after 1/2 and see if it needs more, pumpkin very bland without)

3 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp allspice

1/2 tsp nutmeg

3 large eggs, room temperature

bowl, electric mixer

Combine cream cheese, pumpkin, cream, sugar and spices, mix until well combined and creamy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well each time. Pour into cooled pie crust. Place on a baking sheet in the oven and bake at 375 degrees for 50 minutes, until the pie is mostly set, you’ll want the center to still move a bit, it will set completely while cooling and you don’t want to overcook it. I put foil over the pie for the first 40 minutes so it didn’t burn and took it off for the last 10 minutes to caramelize the filling.

You wouldn’t want to do this with a pastry crust, because it needs to bake, but with the crumb crusts they don’t need that baking time. You may end up covering a pastry crust the last 10 minutes if it is browning too quickly.

Topping:

1 cup heavy whipping cream, ice-cold

3 tbsp, packed, brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon or pumpkin spice

mixing bowl, ice-cold (I also put the beaters in the freezer)

Whip cream on med to high until it forms peaks. Using your fingers, crumble the brown sugar over cream, so it’s not clumped and add spices. Fold ingredients gently until incorporated. Spread or pipe over COMPLETELY cooled pie and refrigerate for 30 minutes before serving.

Makes 8 pieces

I think this pie is a great Thanksgiving idea and can be made a day or so ahead – it’s actually better the next day.

With more of the copycat slaw and some baked beans. I had too much seasoned flour left over after dredging all the chicken and was loathe to just dump it. I added a bit of cornstarch and enough water to make a thin-ish batter and dipped a few broccoli florets for deep frying. It actually worked out better than I had hoped, we may make deep fried veggies a standard part of the hot wings menu.

Recipe for the wings? Moi?

OK! LOL! Disjoint the wings, discard the tips (or save for stock), and pour buttermilk over them in a bowl, cover and refrigerate. You can season the buttermilk with cayenne and paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, salt and pepper – or whatever sounds good to you. I let these marinate for an hour then dredged them in seasoned flour and laid them out on a rack over a tray to rest a bit while the oil heated in my fryer. Fry them in batches at 375 until they are golden, these took 7 minutes or so. I kept the fried pieces in the oven at 200 to keep them warm while finishing the rest.

Mrs J hates my hot sauce so I serve these to her plain and she dips them in a sauce of her choice – usually Sweet Baby Ray’s. I drizzle my pile of wings with hot sauce at the table. Everybody is happy!

I made a batch of breakfast sausage a while back. It is very tasty. This batch I did not bother to stuff into casings because I figured I would cook it into patties, or else use it as the sausage component in my famous biscuits with sausage gravy. The patties picked up a red tinge from the leftover grease in the skillet from the hot Italian sausage I cooked for the pizza last night. Didn’t hurt a thing.

The Blog Roll

About TaMara

What's to say? I love to cook and I think families benefit from sitting down together for dinner every night. I ran What's 4 Dinner Solutions menus service for many year. Soon those menus, recipes and shopping lists will be a series of cookbooks. Guaranteed to make it easier for families to have a quick, delicious and nutritious dinner each night.